YAPC::EU, the European edition of the Yet Another Perl Conference, was this past weekend. As mentioned in a previous post we sent along four of our developers: Alex, Sam, Ignacio and Tim. Here’s a brief (and photo filled) summary of our time in София България (that’s Sofia Bulgaria for those of you who don’t read Cyrillic.)
I (Alex, Nestoria CTO) have been to a lot of YAPCs, but for my team mates Sam, Tim and Ignacio it was their first one. A great opportunity for them to dive deep into the Perl community and learn a huge amount in a short time.
Thursday
Unfortunately this year our flight was too late in the evening, and we ended up missing the traditional pre-conference drinks. I won’t be making this mistake again with any future YAPCs we attend - it sounded like we definitely missed out on a fun night.
On the plus side our flight from London to Sofia was pleasantly uneventful, and our hotel - 10 minutes from the airport, 1 minute from the conference venue - was very nice. I think we all slept well and were ready for the conference to begin on Friday morning.
Friday
Our 1 minute walk from the hotel to the conference venue was nice - no danger of getting lost, just follow the nerdy T-Shirts. Unsurprisingly a lot of other Perl Mongers were staying at our hotel, and the hotel breakfasts got more social as the week went on.
The venue was nice, especially the large room set aside for keynotes, lightning talks and the talks expected to be the most popular. Good chairs, good audio/visual equipment, and very helpful conference staff.
A huge thank you and shout out to Marian Marinov and his team!
And a smaller, but more personal, thank you to Marian for getting our banner printed in time for Friday despite me emailing him the PDF on Thursday morning :-) What do you think? I’m quite proud of it.
Speaking of things I’m proud of, on Friday I spoke about the Nestoria Geocoder and the new OpenCage Data API that allows people outside Nestoria to take advantage of it. I think the talk was quite well received, although everybody’s geocoding challenges are a bit different so some audience members who wanted exact house-number addressing were disappointed.
The scheduling committee had done a nice job this year of grouping together similar talks, which meant that my talk kicked off an afternoon of Geo-related presentations. I particularly enjoyed Hakim Cassimally’s talk on Civic Hacking. I hadn’t realised that MySociety’s projects were being used in Africa and Asia as well as within the UK - very cool!
As usual after the main tracks ended we had the lightning talks. I spoke again - this time about Test Kit 2.0, a slightly shorter version of a talk I gave at a recent London.pm Technical Meeting. Hopefully I convinced a few other developers to delete all the boilerplate from their .t files.
After the lightning talks, Curtis “Ovid” Poe gave a fantastic key note about managerless companies. He started out comparing the extremely hierarchical companies of the 90s and 00s with feudal society centuries ago in Britain, and then went on to give some great real world examples of companies being run differently and how they are succeeding. As well as the usual tech examples of Valve Software and Github he mentioned some non-tech companies, such as Semco in Brazil, which was certainly eye-opening for me. At Nestoria we are pretty good at hiring smart people and giving them the freedom to solve problems in whatever way they see fit; but going truly managerless is a big step up from that, and lead to some great discussions between me and my devs.
Friday ended with the traditional conference dinner, with the traditional challenges of getting a few hundred developers onto a few coaches and to a very very large restaurant. The food was very tasty, and very plentiful; we had fresh bread rolls, two starters, then some Bulgarian folk dance as entertainment, followed by a large main and a very tasty dessert. But the food was definitely topped by the view: the restaurant was on a lake in the Bulgarian countryside, and the sight was stunning.
Saturday
Saturday morning started out with a small Dev Ops track for me, while Sam and Ignacio went to some Web talks, and Tim saw some presentations about search and data.
For my part I really enjoyed Marian’s talk about creating Linux containers with Perl, and look forward to his libraries being finished and up on CPAN.
After lunch was pretty much an MST-fest, as Matt S Trout gave a 50 minute talk on Devops Logique and a 50 minute keynote on The State of the Velociraptor. Both were very interesting, and I had to smile when the topic of Prolog came up - back in university we studied Prolog and Haskell in our first year, quite an unusual introduction to programming I think.
Before the keynote came the second day of lightning talks, and the second day where I gave a talk. This time around I talked about this very blog - and announced live that this month’s Module of the Month winner was Tim Bunce for Devel::NYTProf. Unsurprisingly Tim got a thunderous round of applause, despite not being there this year.
Dan Muey of cPanel gave a great talk about Unicode and Perl which definitely resonated with me; by which I mean it exactly matched our unicode style guide :-)
Sunday
Sam and Ignacio were very excited for Sunday, as that seemed to be where all the web related talks went. Sawyer X gave a particularly good introduction to Plack and PSGI, and then went on to share how Booking.com has managed to gradually shift over to PSGI running on uWSGI. I learned a huge amount, and I hope we can make a similar shift at Nestoria sometime soon.
Susanne Schmidt (Su-Shee) also gave a wonderful introduction to the wide and not-so-varied world of web frameworks. In preparation she had built the same application - a cat GIF browser, naturally - in about 10-20 different frameworks across 5-10 different languages! Unsurprisingly a lot of them are almost identical - Dancer, Sinatra, Django, Rails, Mojolicious all seem to have borrowed ideas from one another over the years. I had no idea though that R (yes, the statistics language) has a web framework! And it’s pretty nice too, you can produce some really great graphs and charts with it with very little code.
I’d also like to shout out Tatsuro Hisamori (aka まいんだー) for coming over from Japan and to tell us about how he sped up his test suite from 40 minutes to 3 minutes. We actually have a pretty similar set up here at Nestoria - spreading different groups of tests over different VMs, with lots of parallelisation and a a home grown web interface to the results. Their project Ukigumo’s web interface looks scarily similar to ours.
To round out the day Sawyer reprised his The Joy In What We Do keynote from YAPC::NA. It’s a touching tale of how he learned programming, and Perl, and how we should all take time to reflect how fun programming can be. The talk ends with some of the Perl language features and CPAN libraries we should be proud of, and we should be talking about in the wider programming community. All in all I left feeling pretty happy to be a Perl dev.
So that was YAPC::EU 2014! It was an absolute blast, and we can’t wait to sponsor and send some devs over to Granada for YAPC::EU 2015 next September.
Of course we don’t have to wait that long for the next Perl event. We’re sponsoring and attending The London Perl Workshop 2014 in November - hope to see you there!